seth m. siegel author of ‘let there be water’ the coffees of … › about › secretary-general...

31 January 2017

Seth M. Siegel

The Coffees of the Secretary-General is delighted to present:

Author of ‘Let There Be Water’

“Can a Desert Nation Help Solve the World’s Water Shortage?”

Seth M. Siegel

THE COFFEES OFTHE SECRETARY-GENERAL

THE COFFEES OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL

Bringing New Perspectives to the OECD

Secretary-General’s Speech Writing and Intelligence Outreach Unit

The Coffees of the Secretary-General: Seth M. Siegel

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Short Bio

Seth M. Siegel Seth M. Siegel is a writer, lawyer, activist, and serial entrepreneur. Seth is the author of the New York Times bestseller Let There Be Water: Israel’s Solution for a Water-Starved World. His essays on water and other issues have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and in leading publications in Europe and Asia. Seth is the Daniel M. Soref Senior Water Policy Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences. He is a Senior Advisor to Start-Up Nation Central, an Israeli non-profit that connects government, NGO and business leaders to the relevant people, companies and technologies in Israel. Seth is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Seth has spoken on water issues around the world and at venues in over 65 US cities, including at the United Nations, the World Bank, the US Congress and Google’s headquarters, and at more than 20 major college campuses, including Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale and Stanford University. Foreign editions of Let There Be Water are available or in production in 40 countries including China, Japan, Vietnam and the Czech Republic and in 14 languages, as of now. He has also spoken at Davos, Congreso del Futuro in Chile, and the Czech Parliament. Seth is the co-founder of several companies, including Beanstalk, the world’s leading trademark brand extension company, which he sold to Ford Motor Company. He was also a Producer of the Tony Award-nominated Broadway revival of Man of La Mancha. Seth sits on the board of several not-for-profit organizations. All of the profits from sales of Let There Be Water are donated to charity. Website: www.SethMSiegel.com Twitter: @SethMSiegel

http://www.sethmsiegel.com/


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Full transcript

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I am delighted to be here. The OECD is the paradigm of the ideal audience. A lot of people talk about issues, but the OECD is the entity that helps develop standards. It collects metrics and, with that data in hand, suggests best practices. We obviously need to focus on best practices, and not just for the developing countries which face specific problems, but for all countries around the world. I therefore hope that our conversation will spark some interest on the issues discussed today. Before I begin, I would like to thank the Secretary-General, Mr. Angel Gurria for inviting me and Mr. Eugene Kandel of Start-Up Nation Central in Israel for suggesting this to the Secretary-General and the Israeli delegation. I am honoured to be here. Let me start my presentation by saying, I am not a lifelong water person. I got involved in the issue as a citizen activist when, no more than five years ago, I learned of emerging global water scarcity. This was before some of the worst effects experienced in the western United States, in Asia and elsewhere. I learned about this global challenge during a meeting at a foreign policy think-tank where a senior US government intelligence officer shared that the world was falling into an era of global water scarcity. The official said that by the year 2025, 60% of the world’s landmass and about 1.6bn people will be experiencing water scarcity on a level from concerning to profound and life threatening.

1 The original transcript of the presentation by Seth M. Siegel has undergone minor editing to ensure that the text published in this brochure is presented in a reader-friendly format.


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You would think that climate change would be the cause of this water scarcity, and of course it is a factor, but it is by no means the only factor. But to discuss how climate change is causing water supply disruptions, we need to look at rain patterns around the world where, almost everywhere, we see disruption. We either have places which have much less rain or we have the same amount of rainfall but in different intervals. With the longer intervals between rains the soil gets harder and the rainwater is not absorbed normally, and it is lost. Our fresh water comes from a couple of sources. It comes either from surface-water, which is from rivers, lakes or ponds. Or from groundwater, and this is where most of the world’s water comes from. The rains fall and saturate the soil and when needed, the water is pumped out. But, as the rain patterns become elongated, they fall much more intensively on hard-packed soil that cannot absorb the water. Climate change is by no means the only factor in global water scarcity concerns. Population also plays a part. Right now, we are around seven billion people, and we are growing - according to UN estimates - to 10bn or 11bn people by mid-century. And everyone needs a minimum amount of water for their food, their sanitation and their livelihood. We therefore need to find new ways of getting water. In addition, not only are there more people, but we are growing more affluent. No one here in this room grew up without running water or electricity in their homes. But of course you know that billions of people around the world today live without running water or electricity. That, however, is changing. There are estimates that 1.3bn people will rise out of the bottom rungs of poverty into the middle class over the next 10 years. They will be using electricity, which is extremely water consumptive; they will have running water; but most of all they will be changing their diets. There may be people in this room, or friends of yours, who are vegetarians or vegans. But I would venture to say that not one of you is a vegetarian because of economic necessity. If you are a vegetarian, it is because of health or ethical or religious reasons, but not because meat is too expensive for you. When these 1.3bn people rise out of poverty, many of them will start having an animal based-protein diet rather than a purely grain-based diet. That is relevant because to grow animal-based food is enormously more water consumptive than grain-based food. Let me frame this with one number. It takes 17 times more water to grow a pound of beef than it takes to grow a pound of corn. So, when that poor person stops eating corn or rice and adds meat to his or her diet, we will need enormously larger amounts of water. As a businessman, I have found that when faced with a roadblock my first thoughts are to find ways around it. As I learned about water scarcity, I began wondering, ‘what is the way around this problem?’ I started reading up on solutions and I discovered something remarkable: we actually do not have a water scarcity problem. We have an innovation-scarcity problem. We have a quality-management scarcity problem. A forward-looking


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legislation scarcity problem. A smart regulation scarcity problem. An imagination-scarcity problem. But in most parts of the world, what we don’t have is a scarcity of water itself, even if it appears that way. The country that I discovered as my paradigm and the subject of my book is Israel. Why is Israel so relevant to this conversation? Israel is in the driest region of the world and since 1970, Israel’s average annual rainfall has dropped by 25%. Since its founding, in 1948, Israel has had the world’s fastest growing population, a tenfold population increase. As for rising affluence, with the exception of Singapore and Korea, Israel’s economic growth has been the fastest in the world in that same period. When looking at all of this, we may tend to think that Israel should be the most water-deprived country in the world, but on the contrary, it turns out that Israel has an abundance of water. I asked myself, how that was possible. How does Israel go from being a small population in a desert to a fast-growing population with a dynamic economy and with water available to its people much like in the western world? Today, we take for granted that water is always available to us and it is absolutely safe for us to drink. Those who have access to water on demand are a minority, only 700 million of the world’s seven billion people. In Israel’s region, there isn’t another country where water is available 24/7. You have to have water delivered occasionally, stored in a tank and make use of it carefully. In poorer parts of the world, you need to fill jerricans and carry them to your home or field. It is worth asking: How is it that Israel, which started out poor and water starved, is now able to have water security and go one step further and supply water to its neighbours? For example, more than half of the water that Palestinians use in the West Bank comes from Israel. A significant percentage of the water that the Palestinians get in Gaza comes from Israel – even in periods of conflict. Israel also provides a significant amount of water to the Kingdom of Jordan.


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On top of all of that, Israel made a decision a long time ago that it would not have a dry economy – i.e. to import all their food. They decided to be self-sufficient in fruits and vegetables. This was done for national security reasons, so that if they were in an embargo or locked-off from the outside world, they would be able to grow enough food for their own people. But they were so successful in that enterprise that today Israel is not only self-sufficient in fruits and vegetables, but it has a multi-billion dollar agricultural export industry. To do that, you need lots of water that you are willing to see exported in the form of fruits and vegetables. How did Israel get to such water abundance? First, Israel has created a culture of conservation. It has very systematically educated its population to think about water as a resource that it can have as much of as it wants but to never lose sight of the fact that it is still a scarce resource. When you marshal a resource that way, you have a reverence for it and you build a culture of conservation. Second, it is important to build on this culture of conservation. After that, everything else is possible and Israelis are prepared to accept all kinds of regulations on the use of water. Israelis are even prepared to do something that happens almost nowhere else in the world, and that is to pay the real price for water. I just had a great meeting with the Secretary-General, and we spoke at length about the importance of charging a price for water. To explain this in a few words, in large parts of the world, water is free or nearly so. The political cost of telling people to pay for their water is very high. In certain parts of the world, however, people do pay for water, but it is a purely fanciful price. It bears no relation to the real cost of sourcing that water and bringing it into our homes, industry and farms. Israel has made the decision that they will not have one single penny of governmental subsidy for their water system. The public pays 100% of the real cost of water. They use sophisticated financing models and long-term bonds to finance the system. And as we know when we have free market choices, people respond in a rational way. If something is seen


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as cheap or free, we’ll use more of it. In Israel, the people know that they have to pay for their water. This leads to conservation, but it also provides the funds to run a modern water system. Because of this, the system therefore becomes totally sustainable. In much of the world, water is used as a political tool or cheap water has political benefits. Israel made the decision quite a number of years ago that it was going to have an apolitical system of governance and regulation. As a result, there is nearly no input from the political class and the water systems of Israel are run by a technocratic, professional body called the Israel Water Authority. Israel provides a model for everyone everywhere in the world on how to manage water. This is the case whether a country has a lot of water or very little, whether it is a rich or a poor country, whether it is land-locked or not. No matter what the country is, having a technocratic, high-quality, high-functioning water body looking out for the nation’s interests as a whole – and not picking winners and losers but creating an even playing field for everybody – is extremely important. Israel also made a decision in 1955, before the time of super computers, that no water could pass from Point A to Point B without going through a meter. Metering provided not just an opportunity to charge for the water, but more importantly, it created an opportunity to develop data on how water was flowing: where it was going, what time of day it was going, who was it going to, how it was being used. The OECD can be a great champion to encourage a universal use of meters, and universal collection of data. It is quite shocking that in a world in which we have data for everything, there is no central point anywhere to capture data about water pricing, water-flows and water usage levels. It is quite remarkable in this day and age of Big Data.


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To fully understand Israel’s success in water, I also need to discuss the role of technology. Many of you know that Israel is a high-tech marvel. Our smart-phones, our computers, our laptops, nearly every tech part of our lives is somehow influenced by Israeli technological innovation. But that technological innovation does not just work for our computers and our digital lives, it permeates itself into all parts of Israeli society. Not surprisingly, some 300 Israeli water-tech companies have been created in recent years to help address both Israel’s own water needs and also global water needs. Let me outline three technologies that Israel created and why this is so significant. Before addressing the first technology, it is important to note that agriculture uses the majority of nearly every nation’s fresh water. In the US, about 70% of fresh water is used for agriculture. Some countries, such as Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia, use between 90% and 95%. Israel realised that if it could find ways of reducing the use of water in agriculture there would be two beneficiaries. First, cities and urban dwellers, and second, the environment. By taking less water out of our system, you can leave more water in. As a result, there is more water flowing and that leads to a healthier environment. With that as background, we can speak about the first important Israeli water technology, drip irrigation. In 1959, drip irrigation was invented. It is a radical and transformative technology which is still not utilised as much as it should be around the world, but it is used universally in Israel. It is a system where, instead flooding the field and hoping for the best, drip irrigation places tiny drippers at the roots, dripping at regular intervals so that plants get the water they need. You can add nutrients to the drippers and then the farmer doesn’t need to fertilise the crops. You can even grow fruits and vegetables in the desert. This is quite a remarkable technology which I argue should be promoted, supported and used all over the world today, especially in developing countries. The second technology is something that is obvious and in front of us every day, something we may not even think about as water at all, and that is sewage. We make no smart use of our sewage. We flush our toilets, we take our showers, we clean our drains, we use this


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water and then, after treatment, we dump it into the nearest river to get rid of it. In 1952, Israel made a decision that this water was too valuable to be thrown away and embarked on a 30-year project to capture the country’s sewage and treat it to an ultra-high pure level so you could drink it if you had to do so. But it would not be necessary to drink this treated sewage because the parallel national water system was built for farm use only and not for drinking water use. The system is perpetually renewing. A tomato is grown in the desert, it is brought back to Tel Aviv, somebody eats it and later that day, they go to the bathroom. Sooner or later, that treated water goes back down to the Negev, and grows another tomato or another fruit or vegetable. It keeps going, year after year. Instead of each drop being used once, it gets used over and over again. The reuse of sewage is a fantastic tool. You may think it is a bit disgusting, but I promise you that 15 years or so from today, the re-use of treated sewage will be standard-operating procedure throughout the world. Water is too valuable and this water is very easy to clean and to reuse. The third technology I will mention is desalination, which is not for every country because it is expensive, but it is not that expensive. Today, through desalination, Israel produces the equivalent of 80% of its domestic household drinking water. It is the cleanest, purest water you can possibly imagine having. In the US, we often speak of a “silver bullet” or a “magic pill” that you can take that will fix everything. But life is complex, systems are complex and it is very rare that one solution fixes everything. At least in water, Israel has understood this and employs an “all of the above” strategy. It is not one or two approaches, but 15 or 20 or 50 innovations that, when integrated, create a very harmonious and fine working system. I want to finish with a few words about water and peace. We all know that water has often been a source of conflict. The third part of my book addresses what I call “hydro-diplomacy”. In the Middle East, and all over the world, there have long been arguments over water. But in the example of Israel we also see how water can become a source of conflict resolution and engagement. Israel has been diplomatically isolated since its birth in 1948, and water has helped to reduce that isolation. For example, Israel provided nearly all of Iran’s water infrastructure and water management oversight from 1962 – when an earthquake destroyed the major irrigation system of Iran – until 1979 when Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran and severed relations with Israel. Iran’s leader reached out to Israel in 1962 via the UN to ask if they could provide two or three advisers to help them get back on their feet. Within three years, there were hundreds of Israeli engineers, hydrologists, geologists and others helping Iran with its water systems. Israel became integral, quietly, to the life of Iran, to the great benefit of Iran in that era. In addition, China, for geopolitical strategic reasons, made the decision to bond itself with the countries of the Islamic Conference. The agreement was that the Islamic Conference would vote with China at the UN and in return, China would have no dealings with Israel. This worked for China for several years, but then the country began experiencing severe water problems, By the early 1980s, the Chinese government realised that Israel had answers for many of these challenges. Teams of Israeli hydrologists were brought to China secretly to diagnose these problems and come up with solutions. This led to a high level of engagement followed by a public recognition by China of this relationship and ultimately led to formal diplomatic relations with Israel. I think that this is a very hopeful story and one that may be repeated with other countries. I earlier mentioned that Israel provides water for the Kingdom of Jordan, for the West Bank and for Gaza. But Israel also provides training for Palestinian hydrologists and water


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administrators in the West Bank. This is done quietly in Israel to assist the West Bankers so they can have a better water future. Of course, there are many problems in this relationship, but we also have successes and possible models on how conflicts can be resolved. Israel today is not as diplomatically isolated as it may appear in the UN. Israel now trades its water technologies with 150 countries which is an utterly remarkable number because it does not have diplomatic or commercial relations with more than a few of those 150 countries. Most of the time when we read environmental or water books, it makes us think the world is coming to an end. But I do hope what you take away from this this session is that there is reason for hope. We can be hopeful because if Israel – located in the driest region in the world – can be water secure, even water abundant, then, as the world grows drier, everyone can also address their water scarcity, if they take steps soon enough. QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION: Mr Ilan Sosnitsky, Deputy Permanent Representative of Israel to the OECD: It was exactly a year ago in, January 2016, when we were in Israel with the Secretary-General and he said we must absolutely do something on water. This is where this idea to bring Seth to the OECD and to speak about his book was born and today Seth is with us. You mentioned several challenges but also contributions of the Israeli experience. Could you share with us some of the major financing and governance challenges vis-à-vis water issues? Seth M. Siegel. What you pose as two separate spheres – financing and governance – neatly dovetail. Finance challenges and governance challenges can be properly seen as a


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management challenge. This goes back to my opening remarks that we really do not have a shortage of water in most of the world. We have a shortage of imagination. There are several different ways to finance water systems. For less developed countries, there are short-term ways through loans, grants, the World Bank or USAID or other donor nations. For self-sustaining countries with a mature tax base, there is no reason why they cannot issue long-duration bonds. Financing therefore is not a problem and there is a lot of capital available. Cash is trying to find opportunities and deals right now. In terms of governance, politicians are going to hold on to power and see everything as a zero-sum game. That is why I have written my book; not for the elites, but for this audience in particular and audiences just like you everywhere because you are the influencers. Our governance will change when citizen activists say ‘enough is enough’. One example is the environmental lobby. In 1962, an American writer, Rachel Carson, wrote a book called ‘Silent Spring’ which talked about how pesticides were destroying our future by killing off insects, which are killing off the birds, which are killing of the natural habitats. Her book became very widely read and sparked off what today is known as the environmental revolution. By 1970, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created. There is no debate that the EPA was established because citizens demanded it. This was bottom up, not top down. The consequences here are as significant as fixing our environment. If we do not reverse water scarcity, we will have an enormous crisis. Let me give you some numbers, in India six hundred million people live on groundwater systems that are no more than 15 years away from giving out if they are not marshalled properly. In sub-Saharan Africa, there are 80 million people who live on similar water systems that are on the verge of giving out. The situation is the same for millions more in South America, with a crisis emerging now in Mexico City. If we do not anticipate this problem, we will be looking back on Angela Merkel’s dilemma to bring in two million Syrian civil war refugees and ask ourselves why was that even a problem. When these problems hit, we will be seeing a humanitarian crisis on a much

larger scale. Many people pay a fairly low price for their water. New treatments such as desalination or waste water treatment, which will be important in the future, will almost certainly mean paying more for water. The cultural change is that you have to convince people that they do not have a choice, they will have to pay. Seth M. Siegel. In America, we say there is no such thing as a free lunch; sooner or later you will have to pay. In this case, we will definitely have to pay later, financially or by a degraded environment. We didn’t talk at all about something called land subsidence. When water is pumped out of ground water and is pumped too low, the sand molecules begin to compress and the city crumbles. This is part of the crisis in Mexico City and it is happening in some places in the western United States. Over-pumping leads to all kinds of infrastructure problems, to environmental degradation, to lower water quality


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and to higher disease incidence. In Delhi, because of political reasons, they charge very low water prices. They charge approximately six US cents for 1,000 litres of water; and no surprise, you get terrible quality water with a plumbing system that doesn’t work most of the time. As a result, people buy water from a water truck, which may offer tainted water, and they pay seven US dollars for 1,000 litres. The right price of course is neither seven US dollars nor six cents. It is about 55 US cents per 1,000 litres. You have to have some political will and make people understand that it is in their best interest to pay the real price for water. In your book you say that the reforms in Israel are replicable elsewhere. What are the conditional factors that could make those reforms happen in another context? Seth M. Siegel. The best way to make other people understand is to explain that there are other parts of the world where something is working very well. One of the revolutionary things I talked about earlier is drip irrigation. Wherever it has been introduced, it reduces the amount of water used, it saves on fertilizer costs and it universally increases crop yields, anywhere from 25% to 300%. Once farmers have experience with drip irrigation, they never want to go back to the system of flood irrigation. We need NGOs and progressive organisations to help make the case. We need to reward reform-minded candidates. We are currently in a period of severe political instability with populist parties on the rise. Ironically, this is a perfect moment for water reforms, because populist politicians can prove they are working on behalf of the common person and traditional politicians should want to show how government can work well. I have two questions. First, I appreciate the wonderful things you say about the Israel. I wish I could get you to write a book like that about Mexico. Have you ever considered working for the Israeli government? Also, your book is almost musical, you have a quote by Bob Marley and the book’s title ‘Let There Be Water’ reminds me of the AC/DC song ‘Let There Be Rock’. If you had to describe your efforts in promoting this work with a song, which song would that be? Seth M. Siegel. Regarding your first question, I am a US citizen, I only carry an American passport, but I will say to you that it pains me very much when I see how Israel is often treated by the world media. And while I understand that no country is perfect, it was happy news for me to discover that a solution to a growing global problem comes out of Israel. Although I wrote the book to tell a water story, and to get people alerted to this problem, I was actually delighted by the opportunity to tell a positive story about Israel. I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be criticism of Israel, but to be fair, it should be balanced. On your second question, the song I would pick would be from The Rolling Stones, and the lyric is: ‘You can't always get what you want/ But if you try sometimes well you might find/ You get what you need’. The song, logically, is named ’You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’

All Photos: OECD/Michael Dean

31 January 2017

Seth M. Siegel

The Coffees of the Secretary-General is delighted to present:

Author of ‘Let There Be Water’


Seth M. Siegel

THE COFFEES OFTHE SECRETARY-GENERAL

seth m. siegel author of ‘let there be water’ the coffees of … › about › secretary-general...

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